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Still circling over Rickmansworth

Whenever I talk to anyone about the book, the first thing they always want to know is when it’s going to be published. Embarrassingly, though, even at this late stage, I still don’t really know. To be fair, while the uncertainty was initially down to our publishers, the tables have now been turned and it’s now pretty much entirely down to my co-author: the publishers have told us that we’re now clear to make our final approach and touch down in the second half of April, but at that time Anthony is in the middle of an exhausting programme of long-haul travel and will be, consecutively, in Bahrain, the US, Peru, Chile and Australia during the crucial period.

This is obviously unhelpful from a PR point of view because, let’s not kid ourselves, “Europe’s leading challenger banker writes financial marketing book” is the story here. It’s not particularly helpful from a patience-of-his-co-author point of view either – after all, I basically finished writing the thing last summer, and have been circling over Rickmansworth waiting for clearance to land ever since.

And of course there is a fairly serious danger that in this fast-changing world, by the time it finally appears it’ll be terribly out of date. If so, then hopefully judging by previous examples it’ll only be out of date in detail, not in its main themes and conclusions. While researching the chapter on data-driven marketing, for example, I was amazed by the strategic foresight and prescience of Peppers’ and Rogers’ 1994 masterwork The One-To-One Future – despite their firm conviction that the emerging one-to-one media that were about to transform consumer marketing were the fax machine, something called “interactive radio” and seat-back advertising screens on aircraft.

I shall have to go back over our manuscript and look for signs of similar misjudgments. I suspect all those prices quoted in groats and guineas are going to have to go.